I am the Shoestring Millionaire

Okay. First confession: I’m not a millionaire – yet. But I’d like to be. In that regard I’m just like every other entrepreneur who launches out into the deep in the hope of attaining success.

If you came to this blog in the hope of discovering the hidden knowledge of a millionaire power broker, you will be sadly disappointed.

I’m not a big-shot. I can’t even pretend to have arrived at that point. My enterprise is what VC’s euphemistically call “pre-commercial”, and I am at best a fellow-traveller on the road to realization. But I don’t think that this disqualifies me as a voice and a resource, because there is one thing that at least some of my readers will share with me, and that is the desire, the drive – the obsession, perhaps, that compels us to be entrepreneurs.

I haven’t arrived, but I’ve come at least part of the way in developing a product from the first glimmer of ideation into a tangible thing. It’s turned out to be much harder than I expected; even after being told point blank by anyone who would talk to me that “it’s harder than you expect”; and the journey from concept to reality has been unexpectedly serendipitous.

I think there’s some value not just in talking to the survivors and successful CEOs who’ve made the journey ahead of you, but also in sharing with fellow entrepreneurs who are at or near the same stage in the evolution of their business. Sometimes you have more to gain in sharing with people who are at the same stage of their professional lives, and who are facing the same kind of challenges.

What I’d like to share is some of the practical experience and perspective that I have gleaned in the development of my first product. It is incredibly difficult, yet all the more rewarding to create a product and to build a business when you don’t have a lot of resources – to be an entrepreneur on a shoestring budget.

This blog is for the others like me, who chose to be shoestring millionaires.